LTE Communications and Networks

5Energy Management in LTE Femtocells

Kapil Kanwal¹, Ghazanfar Ali Safdar¹, Masood Ur Rehman¹ and Xiaodong Yang²

¹ School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Bedfordshire, Luton, UK

² School of Electronic Engineering, Xidian University, Xi’an, China

Wireless cellular networks have seen dramatic growth in number of mobile users. As a result, data requirements and hence base‐station (BS) power consumption has increased significantly. In turn, this adds to operational expenditures (OPEX) and also causes global warming. The BS power consumption in Long Term Evolution (LTE) means, therefore, it has become a major challenge for vendors to stay green and profitable in a competitive cellular industry. It necessitates novel methods to devise energy efficient communication in LTE. Importance of the topic has attracted huge research interests worldwide. Energy saving (ES) approaches proposed in the literature can be broadly classified in categories of energy efficient resource allocation, load balancing, carrier aggregation and bandwidth expansion. Each of these methods has its own pros and cons leading to a trade‐off between ES and other performance metrics resulting in open research questions. This chapter discusses various ES techniques for the LTE systems and critically analyses their usability through a comprehensive comparative study.

5.1 Introduction

Wireless communication has become one of the basic provisions of the modern world. Since the inception of first radio ...